Ping An Bank Co Ltd announced on Wednesday that it had earned 24.8 billion yuan (US$3.69 billion) in profit in 2018, up by 7 percent year on year.

It credited the profit to the successful business transformation to technology-based retail banking.

This was the first annual earnings report from an A-share listed bank.

The Shenzhen-headquartered joint-stock lender said it had achieved “stable and sound” development last year, with the revenue jumping 10.3 percent annually to stand at 116.7 billion yuan.

Its net profit rose to 24.8 billion yuan in 2018, up 7 percent from a year ago. About 70 percent of the overall earnings was contributed by the personal banking sector, the report said.

The bank saw the assets from retail clients under its management surge by a third to 1.41 trillion yuan by the end of 2018. The number of retail clients reached 83.9 million, up by 20 percent from a year before.

While achieving these results, Ping An Bank added that the quality of its assets had improved significantly.

The outstanding overdue loans, an indicator of future non-performing loans (NPLs), decreased by 9.26 billion yuan to 49.4 billion yuan. The balance of loans overdue of more than 90 days dropped by 7.47 billion yuan to stay at 33.9 billion yuan.

Ping An said its NPLs ratio stood at 1.75 percent by the year-end — 0.05 percentage points higher than 12 months ago. The figure was lower than the banking industry’s bad loan ratio of 1.89 in the past year.

The commercial lender attributed the remarkable performance to its commitment to making full applications of cutting-edge technologies in all its business lines including product innovation, marketing, business operation and risk control.

In 2018, Ping An Bank spent 2.57 billion yuan on information technology, almost doubling the expenditure compared to a year ago. Its IT staff had expanded to around 6,000, up by 44 percent year over year.